Coming from EQ and vanilla WoW, I guess I have this concept that a guild is something you don't join lightly. You should meet people, get to know them, make sure the guild is for you. In essence, be as critical of the guild you're joining as the guild is going to be of you as an applicant.

This means that I don't end up joining many guilds. I'll roam around guildless a lot of the time in MMOs, and for some reason random people just seem to be confused/offended by it. I've had whole arguments with people that seemed legitimately upset at me for not joining any random guild. It's weird.

Yeah I really don't get why guilds are how they are.

Why don't most people want to communicate anymore? What's happened to the MMORPG community that they'd rather stay silent and solo unless forced into talking?

Vanilla/TBC/WOTLK wasn't particularly world class at every moment, but it was such a great time because of the people you met and played with. You had a laugh with mates and it made the content so much better. Now everybody just sits there silent, happy to play the game solo.

I log in now, I appreciate the game and the lore, but I just can't get into raiding properly again, or stick to a guild, because it's just silence most of the time.

I'd love to see a massive campaign headed by Blizzard to try and get people back talking.

No, apparently everyone and their mother raided in vanilla so they are more skilled and remember how good everything was.

Thats because the only way to get decent gear was to raid. Even if it was just MC/AQ20/ZG when Naxx was the tip top.(Personally I never cleared that tier 3 content like AQ40/Naxx in vanilla just because all the drama in raiding guilds and being server first.) Sure you could pvp but unless you got HWL you had shit blues that got rolled by raiders.

at the gentleman who asked if it was dunemaul EU, sorry it was dunemaul American =\

Why don't most people want to communicate anymore? What's happened to the MMORPG community that they'd rather stay silent and solo unless forced into talking?

Vanilla/TBC/WOTLK wasn't particularly world class at every moment, but it was such a great time because of the people you met and played with. You had a laugh with mates and it made the content so much better. Now everybody just sits there silent, happy to play the game solo.

I log in now, I appreciate the game and the lore, but I just can't get into raiding properly again, or stick to a guild, because it's just silence most of the time.

I'd love to see a massive campaign headed by Blizzard to try and get people back talking.

Blizzard makes the content, the community makes the experience.

Why bother communicate with people when you dont have to? Earlier (Vanilla/TBC/Early WLK) when people communicated with everyone, and everyone knew everyone on their server, there was a reason to know a lot of people, a real advantage. You had to have in game friends to get shit done. Doing dungeons with only random people was a lot harder and had a much higher risk of just wiping endlessly than doing a dungeon with a couple of people you already knew. I remember reading forums before LFD was released and some people foresaw that the server communities would collapse because of LFD, and I think they were right. It makes running dungeons a much faster experience, but it also made running dungeons a really boring as well.

Don't have the hard numbers to back up my experience, but it would certainly seem so. From what I've seen veteran WoW players (of which I count myself, having played since Classic) have mostly moved on to other games or simply away from WoW. Of the ones still in WoW they seem not to be "hardcore" players anymore, whether they once were or not - opting for more casual play style compared to people who joined in later expansions. Most people who boast that they played in Classic, at least in my experience, usually tend not to have and claim it because they believe it somehow inflates their credibility.

The vast majority of people who played in Classic, even those who raided competitively, had no idea what they were doing in most cases (I know I didn't) - there wasn't the plethora of resources and info out there at your fingertips like there is today. You probably learned how to play your class from a friend or guildmate who was, in all truth, probably as clueless as you were. Rotations/Priorities consisted of one or two abilities spammed as often as mana/energy/rage allowed. In raids a core group of maybe 20 or so people with slightly more knowledge tended to carry the day, and the rest were either there to soak damage, stand in specific places, or provide a very specific buff or utility and weren't counted on for much else. Of course a lot of this had to do with rougher and less-developed systems we were stuck with at the time - classes pigeonholed into very specific roles, classes that were simply mechanically at a disadvantage by design (I was a Warlock myself, and I'm sure my Warlock brethren remember those strange, powerless days), and encounters that depended mostly on external factors (high resistances, specific gear, specific abilities, etc.)

What I guess I'm trying to say is that, in my eyes, I guess it doesn't really matter how many of us are left - WoW is not the game it once was and it belongs to the new blood or those of the old guard that rolled with the punches and stuck around. We're all pretty much just folks now.

"You think so? Then take the universe and grind it down to the finest powder and sieve it through the finest sieve - then show me one atom of justice, one molecule of mercy. And yet you act like there was some sort of rightness in the universe by which it may be judged."

Leftcoast 2 blocks from the beach, down the street from a green haze called Venice.

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Originally Posted by Zdrasti

This sentence is self contradictory. The rest of your post goes on to make up numbers, which would be great for testing your hypothesis, if your hypothesis could be tested -- which it cannot.

1. Easy to test. Can use information gained from a scan of the Armory if I was bothered to write the program. Sure it wouldn't be 100% accurate because it would be data based on Characters and not accounts, but it would give us ratios, which would infer the ratios of subscriptions.
2. The numbers are based on a standard bell curve, which is a fairly accurate estimation of how things work with humans.
3. My post is not at all contradictory, however my language skills fail at times. However my knowledge of sociology and psychology comes from years of study since I was a Psych major.

Started in 06 Vanilla not exactly the beginning but still Vanilla now did I raid .....nope got to 60 when BC was three weeks away so I was planning on how to level my then Blood Elf Paladin.Yes it is very sad to remember all the friends I have made years ago that are no longer there still a lot of good times though.

Last edited by Shroud; 2013-11-21 at 02:10 AM.

yes we are all born from the flames of passion that stirred in the loins of our four fathers![Friend Code: 3325-2545-2595]

According the the polls on this forums 98% of people have played since classic. Yeah, right lol.

I have. Why? I love the game.

a POLL I had up recently on this subject was more like 60% pre-bc, wtih another ~25% from bc. Almost none from cat/panda. I was pretty surprised. wasn't a biased question/poll option either. just expansion and calendar year you started in.

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Originally Posted by Gothicshark

1. Easy to test. Can use information gained from a scan of the Armory if I was bothered to write the program. Sure it wouldn't be 100% accurate because it would be data based on Characters and not accounts, but it would give us ratios, which would infer the ratios of subscriptions.
2. The numbers are based on a standard bell curve, which is a fairly accurate estimation of how things work with humans.
3. My post is not at all contradictory, however my language skills fail at times. However my knowledge of sociology and psychology comes from years of study since I was a Psych major.

i have theorized that realmpop accumulates enough specific data to be able to estimate western sub number changes. I think I wrote up some ideas on how they could do it when the site first appeared. There is definitely the ability to track overall toon activity changes/inactive/lapses/oops (6-months gone).